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Thula looked at him. “We’re talking another twenty kilos minimum for the carbonite shell. Can you haul seventy or eighty kilos around without rupturing something?”

“I’m stronger than I appear,” Kaird said. “And you can put wheels or a small repulsor on it.”

Thula looked at her companion. He nodded. “All right,” she said. “We’ll need two days’ head start from the time you think the alarm will go off.”

“Done. You have five days in which to set it up. That leaves you two days to track vac before I take off.” He pulled a credit cube from his pocket and slid it across the table toward the Umbaran. Squa smiled at it. Thula reached over and took the cube. Squa said, “Thula handles all the money. I’m a terrible accountant.”

“My, my,” the Falleen said, looking at the projection of the cube’s contents inside the palms of her cupped hands. “Black Sun is being more than generous.”

The human shoulders shrugged. “Share the wealth,” Kaird said. “It makes for good business. Everybody goes away happy.”

All three of them smiled at each other. Rictuses all around, Kaird thought. Humanoids are always baring their teeth and pretending it means friendship.

Kaird made his way out of the dining area and to a cleaning closet with an inside lock. He went in as a fat human, and came out robed as one of The Silent, the artificial flesh having been dissolved in the ultrasonic compactor, as it had been designed to do once it was triggered. He had plenty more where that came from.

He wasn’t worried about the Falleen and the Umbaran. Small-time winders, thieves, and con artists were nothing if not pragmatic. The Nediji from Black Sun wants it and is willing to pay handsomely for it? No problem, boss. How many, how big, and how soon?

The next part, however, was going to be a little more tricky. For this, Kaird needed to select a ship fast enough, and with enough range, that he could escape in it with his stolen cargo. It didn’t need any kind of big capacity—at the most, he would get away with fifty, maybe sixty kilos of bota. Even encased in a carbonite block, it wouldn’t be so large that he could not belt it into a copilot’s chair if he had to. He could, of course, attach a repulsor to a block weighing a metric ton or two and move it as easily as pushing a balloon, but something that big would be much more apt to be noticed, and stealth was a major part of his plan. Even the fastest ship likely to be found on this backrocket planet couldn’t outrun a heavy charged-particle cannon’s beam, and he wanted to be well out of ground battery range and beyond orbital picket ships before anybody even started thinking about shooting.

Greed had been the downfall of more than a few thieves, and Kaird had no intention of joining them. Fifty kilos of bota worth thousands of credits a gram, secured in Black Sun’s Coruscant vaults, was worth a lot more than a ton of the same blasted to atoms by some razor-eyed dead-shot Republic gunner—not to mention the ship and pilot that would burn with it. Kaird had not become one of Black Sun’s best operatives, an assassin who had taken out scores of the organization’s enemies without ever once being arrested or even suspected, by being greedy or stupid. You made a plan. Then you made a backup plan. Then you made a backup plan for the backup plan. He already had a ship in mind, and if he could manage it, it would be the perfect vessel. He would begin scouting it as soon as possible. He’d have to make the lift to MedStar, but the alert status had been dialed down somewhat by now, and as a member of a religious order he wouldn’t have any problem getting in the air lock.

And after that, it would be smooth sailing. He could almost smell the sharp, clean air of the eyrie once more…

23

Jos wanted to grill I-Five about the details of his restored memory at length, but unfortunately it was turning out to be another long day patching up the troops. There was nothing especially difficult or enormously complicated about most of the procedures;